Never can one person have been trapped in a lift and so many people know about it. When Stephen Fry found himself stuck in an elevator on the 26th floor of London's Centre Point, he did what any self-respecting 51-year-old gadget freak would do in similar circumstances – he tweeted on Twitter about it.

"We could be here for hours," wrote Fry. "Arse, poo and widdle." Not exactly the creative wordplay that viewers of QI or fans of his numerous TV and radio shows have come to expect, but he did only have 140 characters to make his point.

The patron saint of British geeks, Fry helped to take Twitter mainstream. Jonathan Ross may have launched his Twitter book club, and Ashton Kucher posted a picture of Demi Moore's behind, but Fry was doing it first – and more often – than anyone else. He now has more than 630,000 followers … and counting.

"He has been a genuine word-of-mouth hit," said our panel. "It potentially gives him huge influence over the people who follow him. If he says he is off to vote, then given people's herd mentality, very possibly they will go off to vote as well."

But Fry's prolific tweeting would never have found an audience had it not been for his extraordinary body of work over the past three decades, across TV and radio, film and theatre, newspapers, books and online. Today he seems more prolific than ever.

What he most loves most, however, is gadgets, as is evidenced by the 10,000-word essays he wrote about smartphones on his website, stephenfry.com. He claims to have owned the second Macintosh computer bought in the UK (the first apparently went to Douglas Adams) and until last year wrote the Dork Talk technology column for the Guardian.

"A strange obsession, mine," said Fry. "But better to be addicted to smartphones and gizmos than cocaine or sex, I suppose. Well, I don't know, the result is the same after all, very little sleep, great expense and horrific mess everywhere."

Fry is that rarest of TV and radio presenters – he brings credibility to a subject and also draws big audiences. As well as panel games such as BBC1's QI and TV dramas Kingdom and Bones on either side of the Atlantic, he has written and presented acclaimed documentaries on HIV and depression as well as starred in his BBC1 travelogue, Stephen Fry in America.

A BBC Radio 4 institution, he was also chosen as one of three presenters to chair its long-running panel show, I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue, after the death of Humphry Lyttleton.

Such is his appeal to audiences and commissioning editors alike, Fry can pretty much choose any project he wants.

But why wait for a commissioning editor's green light when you can go direct to your audience on the web? Fry has done that as well, with his chart-topping "podgrams", audiobooks, blogposts and even the range of T-shirts available on his website, run by SamFry, the company he created with long-term collaborator Andrew Sampson.

If Fry ever appeared out of step with public opinion in the last 12 months, then it was his take on the MPs' expenses scandal. He called it a "journalistic made-up frenzy" and a "tedious, bourgeois obsession", turning his fire on journalists about whom he said he had "never met a more venal and disgusting group of people when it comes to expenses and allowances".

Fry's humour is timeless, but his appetite for technology is very much of the moment.